Economic Beat

More Disinflation Lies Ahead

With the consumer-price index up just 1.5% for December, critics are likely more annoyed than ever. Get used to it.

Of the major economic indicators, the consumer-price index has attributes that make it special. For one thing, unlike such measures as employment, retail sales, and gross domestic product, the CPI is never revised. What you see on the day it's released is exactly what you'll get whenever you look it up. Thus, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Thursday that the December CPI was up 1.5% from the same month a year earlier, we could be confident that no revision would ever alter that figure one iota.